Sorting Data Sets and Computing Medians for Skewed Distributions

Abstract

Clusters derived from data sets require meaningful interpretation, for which standard statistical packages, major spreadsheets, numerical computation texts, as well as the specialized Journal of Classification provide little help. Interpretation can be made from a profile of summary scores, means, or medians, representing distributions of scores. For such a profile, medians are preferable to means where the distributions are highly skewed. To automate computation of medians in either ordered or unordered sets of scores, a program, SHELMEDS.BAS, was written incorporating the very fast Shell-Metzner sort algorithm and routines for odd or even numbers of scores.